Howl Deadly (15 page)

At least I’d gotten the last names of the few people with whom I was acquainted.

I could Google every name I had and see if anything exciting turned up—like whether Warren Beell blogged about how much he hated wolves.

Okay, I admit I spent an hour on the attempt. I didn’t bother with Dante and Brody, but I found quite a bit about Megan and her championing of wildlife.

Krissy had been quoted in an article for a local college newspaper about how she didn’t like the way some upperclassmen harassed incoming students and did what she could to stand up for them, even getting in their faces.

Anthony, a player on his high school football team, had gotten a few exciting scholarship offers. That was on a Web site for his school, and his reputation on the football field sounded a lot ornerier than he was at the sanctuary.

Irwin was apparently an accountant who commuted to a big CPA firm in L.A. I found nothing that indicated anything about his personality, but recalled the minor dispute he’d mentioned with Jon Doe.

And Warren worked for a car dealership and would be glad to assist any visitors to their lot to find the perfect deal. He apparently had an affinity for wild animals, since I found several articles quoting him regarding rescues. And he had come to HotWildlife one day spoiling for a fight after being all but accused by Megan of stealing back mama wolf.

Any genuine suspects in this ragtag group? I doubted it.

I did learn addresses and phone numbers for nearly all of them. But none of the sites I found stated that any of them had a grudge against Jon Doe, nor that one of them had stabbed him.

Gee, what a surprise.

What else could I do from inside my cozy law office? Not solve the murder, apparently. But that didn’t keep me from continuing to work on it.

I called Sergeant Frank Hura after bringing the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner’s Department Web site up on my computer. I looked at his photo as I spoke with him.

“Hi,” I said, attempting to sound utterly ingenuous. “I was there the other day when you were questioning Dante again, and heard you talked to Brody another time, too. Do you need anything else from me?” Not that I hoped to suddenly head his suspect list, but if I was there being interrogated, I could ask a few additional questions.

“I know about you, Kendra.” He sounded as if he smiled. “You’ve solved murders in the past for Ned. Or against Ned. I think my department had better handle this one ourselves.”

“Then you won’t even tell me who your major suspects are, and why?” I hoped I sounded flirtatious.

“I think you can guess the who. And the why I can’t reveal till we’re ready to make an arrest.”

“I’m assuming you mean Dante or Brody,” I guessed. “But, Frank, why on earth would someone of their stature pick on some little wildlife sanctuary handyman?”

“As I’m sure you know, Kendra, things aren’t always what they seem.” He sounded like he enjoyed taunting me a bit.

I pretended to be confused. “You can’t mean that Dante isn’t Dante DeFrancisco of HotPets. Or that Brody isn’t Brody Avilla of film and
Animal Auditions
fame. So—oh, I get it. Jon Doe isn’t Jon Doe? Or he didn’t work at HotWildlife? Or he wasn’t a handyman?”

“Well, he did work at HotWildlife, Kendra. And he did use that name there.”

“Then he wasn’t Jon Doe? Do you know who he really is, Frank?” I asked excitedly, dropping any semblance of stupidity. Lack of knowledge, though—now that I could easily admit. “And if you do, how did you learn it?”

“We have a good idea,” he responded vaguely. His image on my computer screen seemed to smile snidely at me, but I resisted slapping it away. “And how we learned what we did was by using general law enforcement resources.”

But the guy’s fingerprints apparently weren’t in AFIS
, I wanted to shout at him.
So what resources did you use
?

Well, hell. I didn’t have to reveal my resources, either. But I could offer a guess. “So did the fact that Jon Doe’s fingerprints weren’t in the system suggest to you that he’d been an utter angel before, or was there some foul-up somewhere that kept his prints out?”

The imagined smile on my screen turned sour as seconds passed before Frank answered. “You’re too smart for your own good, Kendra. But if you dig too deeply into this as a civilian, you’re liable to wind up in big trouble. Stop your snooping now.”

 

 

OKAY, SO I’D come across yet another irritable cop. There’d been times that Detective Ned Noralles of the LAPD had warned me off even more strongly. And that was generally without intriguing me with hints of stuff I absolutely intended to learn.

But for the moment, I said a meek goodbye as if I was buckling under, then hung up.

And stared at the phone while envisioning tossing epithets Frank’s way.

Should I call Ned to tell him about this awful conversation? I decided to do so, but got his voice mail. I left an oblique message that suggested I’d done something he might not approve of, and asked him to call me back.

So what, then, should I do with the rest of my afternoon?

Call Dante
, dared a little voice inside me.

Like hell
, I told it back.

Instead, I attempted to concentrate on some further research into elder law conservatorships for the benefit of Alice Corcorian. Despite my good intentions, my mind kept wandering.

Who was Jon Doe? And why had he died?

“Damn!” I exclaimed softly to myself, as if that would get my mind back in gear. Not!

My office phone rang just then. Great! My sanity was suddenly saved by the bell.

“Hi, Kendra, it’s Avvie,” said the voice on the other end. “I just interviewed for a job in Calabasas and am on my way through the Valley, back toward town. Can you break away for a cup of coffee with me?”

Could I? Absolutely! “Just tell me where and when,” I said.

 

 

 

AVVIE MILTON HAD been a new associate at the law firm of Marden, Sergement & Yurick when we first met. These days, we had much more in common—having both been screwed by senior partner Bill Sergement at different times.

She was also the proud owner of Pansy, a potbellied pig whom I’d pet-sat now and then. Pansy had also trained with some of the piggy cast of
Animal Auditions
, although she hadn’t been an official contestant. She was so smart that she’d likely have outshined all the others—or so Avvie had maintained.

Now, Avvie and I sat at a small, round table inside one of the large coffee shop franchises. I’d decided I needed to sweeten my day, so I’d ordered a café mocha. Avvie had gotten one of the concoctions of coffee, frothy milk, and who knew what else?

“So tell me, how are things going with Dante?” she asked, taking a sip of her hot brew.

Avvie looked utterly professional in a navy suit and white blouse. Her hair was short and highlighted, her hazel eyes somewhat shadowed. I knew it had taken a lot out of her to finally realize that Bill Sergement was an utter louse and had only been using her for fun. Not that I’d kept that opinion to myself even as the affair was going on.

“Okay, though we’re taking things slowly.” I took my own sip in punctuation.

“Really? I thought he was all hot and heavy over you.”

I shrugged slightly in my own, less dressy suit jacket. “We’ll see. Now, tell me about the job you just interviewed for.”

Avvie was also a litigator. She’d taken on a lot of civil suits at the Marden firm, mostly for the defense. She’d excelled at it, as I had. That’s one reason we’d become buddies.

“It’s a small boutique firm, but they take on a lot of interesting cases,” she said. Her eyes began glowing, so I knew she was way interested in the position. “They sought me out, in fact, because of my success in the Crader case.”

I’d heard of it, of course. A wealthy local business-man had been accused of breaking into the home of a lovely film star he’d just met, blindfolding her, and sexually assaulting her. There hadn’t been enough evidence to convict on criminal charges, but the star had sued for civil damages.

Avvie had handled the businessman’s defense and had shown that the evidence pointed in a different direction—even though whoever had allegedly done it wasn’t ever identified.

“The case had been really high profile, and the partners at this firm were impressed. They tend to take on fairly well-positioned clients in difficult cases, and they’re highly compensated for it. We’re both still weighing whether I should work there, but I’m definitely interested.”

“Good luck with it,” I told her sincerely. “I think it sounds great. Oh, and I have a question for you. Who do you think really assaulted Ms. Crader?”

She leaned over the table toward me. “I don’t imagine we’ll ever know for sure. My client’s fingerprints were in the apartment, but he’d been an invited guest the previous evening. And they weren’t the only prints. My vote goes to a guy who remained unidentified.”

“The prints were there, but the cops can’t make an ID?” I asked. My interest in fingerprints had, unsurprisingly, spiked a bit lately.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I learned that the system is far from perfect. Only . . . well, in this instance it may have been someone in the system deciding to protect whoever had left those prints.”

“Really? Does that happen a lot?” Now, my interest was absolutely piqued.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I doubt it. No one admitted it in this case, and it might have been a wrong impression on my part.”

Or not. I had my own suspicions about some prints in the national system—Jon Doe’s. Or whoever he actually was. But I figured I was heading toward a dead end. Even if there was such a thing as protecting someone’s identity by not acknowledging whose prints were whose, I could probably never prove it.

Or who Jon Doe really was.

I asked Avvie about Ellis Corcorian. Other than suggesting he was as much of an ass as I recalled, she hadn’t much to say about him.

We soon finished our coffees. “Great to see you,” I said.

“Same here.”

“And be sure to keep in touch. Let me know what happens with the job.”

“Will do.” She gave me a hug at the shop’s door, and we each walked our own way—me to my office, and her to her car.

 

 

 

I FELT DISHEARTENED over the subject of fingerprints after coffee with Avvie. I moped as I mused about it on my walk back to the Yurick firm’s building.

I guess, inside, I’d held out a lot of hope that there was some deep and dirty government conspiracy that had obfuscated the genuine identity of Jon Doe except for a privileged few whom the system assumed truly needed to know.

On the other hand, Jon Doe might, in fact, never have had his prints taken. If he had, a mistake could have kept his identity secret, without anyone intending it. As with everything else in the legal system, a perfect process remained only as accurate as those who used or abused it. And whatever Frank Hura had hinted to Ned—well, it could have come from professional discourtesy, pulling one another’s law enforcement legs.

In any event, I needed to look in different directions.

After responding to phone messages, briefly chatting with Borden about the Corcorian case, and doing additional research into conservatorships, I decided to make one more call before leaving my office for the day.

“Hi, Ned,” I said when he answered. “Forget, for the moment, what Frank Hura may have hinted about—or not. What’s your opinion on how much police departments can rely on fingerprint IDs?”

I heard his snort from the other end of our connection. “Sorry I even brought up the idea of prints, Kendra. I got a call from Frank chewing me out for talking to you at all about his case, when I don’t have jurisdiction. I promised him I’d butt out. Sorry. But I gather I was all wet about my interpretation of what he said. He said his guys had done some more digging. Jon Doe was exactly who he appeared to be. No problem with his prints. No record. Nothing. My opinion of fingerprint ID is that it works—very well. And Frank kept it close to his Kevlar vest who he thinks is now his top suspect—but I gather it’s still Dante.”

 

 

 

THAT SOUNDED SUSPICIOUS to me. Full of conflicting assumptions.

If Jon Doe was Jon Doe, then why would Dante have decided to kill him?

If he had a history under another identity, then why would the cops have determined he didn’t?

My belief was that Sergeant Frank Hura had decided that the best way to encourage Detective Ned Noralles to keep his nose where it belonged, in L.A., was to make up his alleged facts as he went along.

But all this was getting me exactly nowhere.

Yet each time before, when I’d stuck my nose into a murder investigation, the parties under suspicion had needed me. Relied on me. Cared about my solving the killing.

And Dante only wanted me to butt out.

“What do you think about that?” I asked Beauty, the golden retriever, as I took her on a long walk in her northern San Fernando Valley neighborhood a while later. She was my first pet-sitting visit of the evening, before I picked up Lexie at Darryl’s.

Beautiful Beauty did take the time away from sniffing some grass at the edge of a lawn to look at me sympathetically, as if sensing my angst, but she gave me no answers.

I next headed to Harold Reddingham’s home. A long-term pet-sitting client, he had gone out of town for two days, so I had to peek in to ensure his kitties, Abra and Cadabra, were okay. When they deigned to show themselves as I checked their food and water supply, I considered asking them their opinion, but figured I’d only get their typical tail-in-the-air stares.

There was at least one human opinion I valued that might be given readily at my request: Darryl’s.